By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson I was going to write about something else today, but it can wait another day, and this is just too rich to pass up. It’s a post from Political Irony, followed by a video by Bill Maher that covers the identical ground. Some commenters think that one copied from the other. […]

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson Part 1: Fire In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Barack Obama gave America just what it needed – a generous helping of optimism. We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. […]

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson Part 2: Ice By tradition, the President’s loyal(?) opposition gets air time to disagree. Paul Ryan (R-WI1), who chairs the House budget committee, got the assignment, more likely because he is the only Republican who has come up with something that looks like a deficit-cutting plan, than by virtue of his […]

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson Part 3: Grading the Presentations I haven’t mentioned the second rebuttal, originally meant for Tea Party members alone, but picked up by CNN and broadcast nationally, partly (with all due respect) because it began “Good evening, my name is Congresswoman Michele Bachmann from Minnesota’s 6th District. I’m hard put to take […]

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson George Fox lived in the 17th Century. An English Dissenter (from the Church of England), he helped found the Religious Society of Friends, a.k.a. Quakers. One of the principles that guided Fox is that there is something holy in every person. Tonight, I’m going to look for the holiness in Paul […]

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson My ego is healthy enough to allow me to subscribe to Google Alert. The basic service is free; you give it a search term (or more than one) and every day it sends you links to places where that term appears on the Web. If you’re a writer who depends on […]

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson I know it’s bad form to say anything negative about the dead, but I’m going to forget that while I draw a line from Ronald Reagan to today’s Republican party. Follow me and you’ll see how Reagan’s legacy is the permission assumed by present-era Republican officials and would-be officials to mangle […]

Posted by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson [This essay, reposted from Truthout, is such a brave piece of work that I wanted to bring it to you without even asking you to click on the link where the original is to be found. Its author, Barry Wingard, is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air National Guard […]

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson When he became King of England in 1154, at 21, Henry II named his childhood friend,Thomas Becket, his chancellor, something like a US President’s chief of staff. Seven years later, Henry promoted his friend to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, hoping for Thomas’s help in bringing to heel a hierarchy […]

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson Here are some of the bills filed since January 5 by members of the new House majority. They’re here to show you, as if you didn’t already know, where their heads are. (This is not meant as snark, honestly.) H.R. 1 – Reserved for the Speaker. By tradition H.R. 1 is […]